over a hundred years ago by William Blake, but it is modern and part of that brightest and most beautiful room of all English poetry—Nineteenth Century Poetry. What is a rhyme? You can tell if you will study this stanza from "The Lamb." You will see that "thee" of the first line rhymes with "thee" of the second, that "feed" and "mead" rhyme, and that "delight" and "bright" rhyme just as "voice" and "rejoice." Old English poetry was different, too, in that it did not count the syllables in a line of poetry. If you drum on the table and count the syllables of the first and second lines, you will see that each has six, and the following six lines have seven syllables each, and the last two six each. Then if you drum a little more you will see that each of the first two lines has three accents or stresses, and the following six four accents or stresses each hong kong incorporation.

Then, you ask, what was this old English poetry like? Even if the syllables were not counted and there was no rhyme, it had accents just as our modern poetry has. Every line was divided into half verses by a pause, as, for example:Warriors of winters young with words spake.

There are two accented syllables in the first half of this line, and one in the second. And now, instead of rhyme, what do you think the old English[Pg 40] poetry had? Alliteration. That is a big word, but it is not nearly so difficult as it seems, for it means simply the repetition of the same letter at the beginning of two or more words. Here it is, the letter "w" that is repeated. It was poetry with alliteration and stress which little Finan heard on that night so long ago when the angel came to C?dmon and commanded him to sing joyetech egrip vt.

After C?dmon's day there were more and more religious poets. Very often the men who wrote the poetry and prose during the time of C?dmon and of Cuthbert lived in monasteries, where the life was a religious life. In the Great Palace of English Literature there is a pretty story told about Ealdhelm, who was a young man when C?dmon died. This young man later became the Abbot of Malmesbury. He was not only a religious poet, but he also made songs and could sing them to music. He traveled from town to town, and, finding that the men at the fairs did not come to church as they should, he would stand on the bridge and sing songs to them in the English tongue, persuading them thus to come to hear the word of God. Living at this same time—that is, during the latter half of the seventh century—was St. Cuthbert, not so great a scholar as Ealdhelm, but as great a wanderer seo hk.